IP: Why is This Important? Read: The Politics of Hacking

["Vladimir Z. Nuri" <vznuri@netcom.com>]

From: believer@telepath.com
Subject: IP: Why is This Important? Read: The Politics of Hacking
Date: Fri, 25 Sep 1998 04:19:59 -0500
To: believer@telepath.com

----------------------------
NOTE:  Here is why the issue is important:  "Mitnick has been incarcerated
for three and a half years without a hearing and has had the evidence to be
brought against him withheld from discovery."  No habeas corpus.  No
hearing.  No evidence.  This man is a political prisoner to whom justice
has been denied.  Is he guilty?  No one will ever know if there is never a
trial.  Presumption of innocence is obviously a thing of the past.  
----------------------------

Source:  Online Journalism Review
http://olj.usc.edu/indexf.htm?/sections/

September 16, 1998

The Politics of Hacking
By Doug Thomas, Online Journalism Review Staff Columnist 
 
Over the past few years there has been a decided shift in the way hackers
think about the world. Born from an idealistic model of personal,
individual achievement, the very idea of hacking has always been a singular
and isolated phenomenon. In the early days, hackers rarely worked in groups
or teams, preferring to hand programming solutions off to one another in
the process of what they called "bumming code." Each time a
program was handed off, it would be improved slightly and then passed along
to the next hacker, and so on. 
 
Hackers of the 1980s and 1990s, who began to form loosely knit groups such
as the Legion of Doom and Masters of Deception, practiced a similar ethic,
whereby hackers would learn from one another, but generally the
understanding was everyone for themselves (especially whenever someone got
arrested!). 
 
That ethic, which began with the hackers of the 1960s and 1970s, is
beginning to dissolve in the face of politics. 
 
Old school hackers are oftentimes disgusted by the antics of their progeny
(and make no mistake they are their offspring). Indeed, many old-timers
insist that today's hackers are unworthy of the moniker "hacker" and prefer
to terminologically reduce them, calling them "crackers" instead. That
distinction has never held much truck with me. It denies too much history,
too many connections, and is often nothing more than a nostalgic, and very
convenient, recollection of their own histories. 
 
The earliest hackers did most of what they criticize today's hackers for.
Let's face it, they stole (the Homebrew Computer Club was famous for
pirating code), they regularly engaged in telephone fraud (even Jobs and
Wozniak built and sold blue boxes), they used all sorts of hacks to avoid
paying for things (remember TAP? TAP stands for Technological Assistance
Program; it was a newsletter put out by the Yippies that taught people how
to use technology to avoid paying for things.), and they had no problem
with breaking and entering or hacking a system if it meant they could spend
more time on the mainframe. 
 
They also tended to forget a lot of things. Who paid for all those
computers at Harvard, Cornell and MIT? Who funded ARPAnet? Could it be the
same folks who were busily napalming indigenous persons halfway around the
globe? And why were those computer labs shielded by 1" thick bullet-proof
plexiglass during the 1960s? The old school history is not as simple as it
sometimes appears. Yes, they were the geniuses who gave us the first PCs,
but along the way, they tended to be implicated in a lot of nasty business,
to most of which they were all too willing to turn a blind eye. 
 
I don't mean to suggest that old school hackers were not hackers, only that
they weren't all that different from the new schoolers that they like to
brands as criminals, crackers and the like. 
 
Where the old school seems to come off as (at best) forgetful, the new
school has shown a new kind of commitment, something that is virtually
unthinkable to hackers of yesteryear. 
 
The hackers of the late 1990s are becoming political. There is a new move
to group action, political involvement and intervention. 
 
Recently, seven members of the Boston hacker collective, the L0pht,
testified on Capitol Hill before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee.
As Peter the Great described in his write-up of the testimony: "Mudge gave
a short, elegant statement which set the tone for the rest of the day's
talks. He expressed his hope for an end to the mutual animosity that has
long existed between the hacker community and the government and his
sincere desire that the ensuing dialogue would pave the way towards
civility and further collaboration between
the two sides. This was a beautiful moment. It was as if a firm hand of
friendship was being extended from the hacker community to the senate. I
was moved, truly." 
 
This is a gesture that would have been virtually unthinkable only a few
years ago. 
 
Even more dramatic is the fact that the Cult of the Dead Cow has a policy
on China. In part, that policy was used in their justification for the
release of Back Orifice, a computer security program that exploits
vulnerabilities in Windows 95 and 98 operating systems. According to the
cDc, Microsoft's decision to choose profit over human rights in supporting
trade with China implicates them in the politics of oppression. The cDc has
been working to support a group of Chinese dissidents, the Hong Kong
Blondes, who are learning to use encryption and hacking techniques to stage
interventions in Chinese governmental affairs to protest Chinese human
rights violations. 
 
 Most recently,  at home,  hackers have begun to band together in an effort
to raise public awareness about the imprisonment of Kevin Mitnick, a hacker
facing a 25-count federal indictment. Mitnick has been incarcerated for
three and a half years without a hearing and has had the evidence to be
brought against him withheld from discovery. In response to Miramax's
decision to film Mitnick's story, hackers have banded together, launching a
full-scale protest (among other things) in front of Miramax's offices in
New York. Their campaign also includes letter writing initiatives, the
distribution of "FREE KEVIN" bumper stickers, Web sites, T-shirts and even
an online ribbon campaign. Another group recently hacked the New York Times
Web site. 
 
The late 1990s marks a point in time when computers have begun to affect us
in undeniably political ways. The globalization of technology, coupled with
the power that the computer industry wields, makes hacking, in this day and
age, essentially a political act. Some of the effects can be seen in the
highly politicized trial of Kevin Mitnick and in the efforts to pass the
WIPO treaty, legislation that makes hacking (even legal experimentation) a
criminal act. 
 
The differences between old school and new school hackers are not as great
as they might appear or as they are often made out to be. If there are
differences, they reside in the fact that hackers today are stepping up 
and taking a kind of political responsibility that was altogether alien to
their predecessors. 
 
The future of hacking goes hand in hand with the future of technology. In
today's society we have passed the point where we can deny the import of
such action based on some nostalgic vision of our relationship to computers
and the world. It is high time that the hackers of yesterday take a long,
hard and sober look at their own history and begin to recognize the ways in
which the hackers of today are picking up and championing an agenda which
the old school hackers can no longer hide from. 

� Copyright 1998 Online Journalism Review

Doug Thomas is an Online Journalism Review staff columnist and a professor
at the Annenberg School for Communication. 
-----------------------
NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is
distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior
interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and
educational purposes only. For more information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
-----------------------




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